


Never For Money, Always for Love

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [269]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1930s, Alternate Universe - Criminals, Bottom Loki (Marvel), M/M, Memories, Odin's A+ Parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-07 04:11:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19201639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: The job went bad fast. But when didn't they? That’s how the game got played.





	Never For Money, Always for Love

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Partners in crime.

The job went bad fast. But when didn't they? That’s how the game got played.

Truth be told, things would’ve been fine had Baldr not tried to screw them. Loki had tried to warn Thor repeatedly that the man couldn’t be trusted, no matter how much muscle he brought to the table; Baldr was the type of crook who never made his own work but hitched his wagon to others--a taker, not a giver. He had no imagination, no insight. And he wasn’t even that good in bed.

But Thor hadn’t listened, the stubborn ass that he was, and now Baldr had taken the best of the loot for himself and left the two of them, as it were, high and dry.

“He has kids,” Loki said. “What have I told you, huh? Never trust anyone who has children. It fucks with their decision-making.”

Thor sighed and turned back to look through the windscreen. “What’s done is done, Lo. There’s no use haranguing me about it now.”

“I disagree. There’s _every_ use. Killing time, for instance. How much longer?”

“Another few hours. We’ll be there soon, before morning. You should try and get some sleep.”

Loki dug himself into the passenger’s seat of the Packard, scowling. “I don’t need a nap, Thor. Don’t treat me like a cranky child.”

“Then stop acting like one,” his brother said to the road, to the darkness, to the lonely stretch of road that lay ahead. “Easy, right?”

They were headed for a safe house of sorts up near Erie, a bedraggled little place that their father had bought and as a joke named _Valhalla_. There was running water and a kitchen, a fireplace; in the corner, a four-poster bed. When they were kids, there’d been cots, three of them, in the same space the bed now swallowed. It was the only accuretrement that Thor had agreed to, the only change to the space he’d allowed Loki to make. He missed their father, Loki’s brother did, and it brought him some sort of comfort, keeping the cabin as it had been. But Odin was dead and they weren’t children now and the pretense of separate cots was long gone, washed away in first their shared grief and then in a common lust and now, after almost five years, Loki couldn’t remember the last night that he’d slept alone.

“I hate this place,” he said when they stood in the first hints of sunlight, staring the closed shutters, the hammered steps, the roof blanketed in pinecones and leave.

“No, you don’t. You’re just tired.” Thor slipped around the hood of the car and laid a hand on Loki’s hip, slid the other through the tangled mess of his hair. “Come inside and wash your face, hmm? I’ll make you breakfast.”

“There’s no good being nice to me. I’m still angry with you.”

“All right,” Thor said mildly. His thumb brushed Loki’s cheek. “Be mad all you want. Doesn’t change the fact that you need to eat.”

Inside, things were dusty. Loki made a show of pulling the sheets from the furniture, a mundane sort of unveiling: Odin’s armchair, the battered settee, a wobbly coffee table that Thor had made when they were kids. The bed. The bed.

While Thor rattled in the pantry, Loki pulled clean linens from a closet and made the bed. There was a fitted sheet, a flat one, a quilt older than both of them. Pillowcases faded from white to ivory, bent with neat creases where Loki had folded them the last time--had long had it been? A year, maybe. A little more.

They were better at the family business than their father had ever been and they didn’t have to hide out here very often anymore; they lived most of their lives out in the open, walking down the sooty streets of Pittsburgh with a confidence borne of success, of establishment, of jobs run not just in the Steel City but in Philadelphia and Baltimore and even, sometimes, New York. They worked only as much as they had to and kept only what they needed; the rest of it they could afford to quietly give away or lose to the Baldrs of the world, the stupid unscrupulous types who, in Loki’s opinion, gave the whole stealing-from-the-rich thing a bad name. Nobody in Pittsburgh remembered their father; he’d worked hard to keep it that way. But Loki and Thor had made a conscious choice to be known, to become respectable members of their community--the last people, Thor liked to say, that the cops on the beat would even think to suspect; it was better to hide in plain sight.

But there was one part of their lives that they had to keep hidden in the city. They couldn’t walk around holding hands or kiss in the street; they couldn’t stand too close on the trolley or make eyes at each other over a drink. They had to be careful, even behind their own locked doors; the walls in their duplex on the South Side sometimes felt paper-thin. It was only out here, where it had all started, that they could be as loud as they wanted, could give in to the feral passion of the old days and make love without fear of somebody watching or hearing or judging and it was the one thing, the one, that made the trip up here palatable for Loki, knowing it would end with him on the bed, crushed between the mattress and his brother’s big, greedy dick, making as much noise as he damn well wanted every time Thor’s cock rocked in and out and brushed that hot, perfect spot.

Loki was still mad at his brother, of course, still furious at his seemingly God-given ability to ignore sage advice. But his hands were kneading the quilt, too, and he was breathing harder, and that had to come first, didn’t it? Before they could eat breakfast or shout at each other about what had gone wrong. His brother. His body. This bed.

The floorboard creaked. He turned his head. Thor was standing there, holding a can of something, his coat gone, his sleeves rolled up, his eyes bright and yet somehow beautifully dark.

“Loki,” he said, burnished silver. “Is there something you want?”

Loki’s voice was a tremor. His arms were, his hands still braced on the bed. “Yes,” he said to the man he loved above everything, the only person in the world whose welfare worried him more than his own. “Thor. I need you.”

When his brother kissed him, can abandoned and his hands in Loki’s hair, holding, the steel in his body pressing Loki’s hips to the bed, Loki felt the fight in him soften, the anger of the last hours, the fear, leaking out like hot air, leached out through Thor’s kisses, the busy slide of his fingers, the warm, perfect press of bared skin.

“I remember the first time we did this,” Thor murmured against Loki’s throat, his palms sliding under Loki’s trousers and into his shorts, swallowing the curves of Loki’s ass. “The first time you asked for me like that. You were so beautiful, brother. So greedy. There were tears all over your face.”

Loki pressed into Thor’s grip. “I wasn’t crying for Father.”

“I know that. I knew even before you told me.”

“I was angry.” Loki licked his brother’s lips. “I was sure you were going to leave me. Go off with Baldr or Frigg or somebody like you always said that you would.”

Thor made a soft, sad sound. His grip on Loki’s ass tightened. “Wouldn’t have left you, Lo. If I’d gone, I’d have taken you with me.”

“Would you?” It was an old question, an old game between them, but now, here, it felt real. “Would you really?”

“Yes, baby. Yes. _Yes._ ”

The first time had been rough, both of them pulled thin by the pain of their father’s last hours, the terrible cries of pain as the cancer bit at his bones, and then the awful, unending silence. They’d buried him in a little clearing in the woods behind the house, six feet down like he’d taught them and wrapped in an old, white sheet. It was nearly dark by the time that they’d finished and stumbled up the steps back into the house. It had still stunk of the dying. There hadn’t been any morphine left.

But there had been dirt on Loki’s hands when he’d reached for his brother that night, pine needles still sharp in his hair, and when Thor had clutched his wrists and stared at him, stared, he’d been frightened but unwilling to take a step back.

“What the hell are you doing?” Thor had said.

“You must know,” Loki’d said, brittle, “or you wouldn’t be trying to stop me.”

He’d been sure that Thor would push him away--one last rejection before fleeing to find a new life, one free from all ties of the past--but instead, his brother had looked at him again, those blue eyes turning and searching, looking past the gathering shadows to find the outlines of Loki’s face.

Thor said: “Are you sure?”

“Of what?”

“That this is what you want. Me.” Thor’s thumbs had stroked his wrists, all at once gentle. “Are you sure?”

Loki laughed. He’d tried to. But all that came out was a croak. “Gods, yes.”

And then Thor’s grip had shifted, had crawled up his arms past his elbows and crested on the tops of his shoulders, come to rest on the back of his neck. “If you don’t feel the same tomorrow,” he said softly, “if you want to leave here, you can, Lo. You can leave and never look back.”

In the morning, though, Loki had crawled sore and needy from his cot and onto his brother’s and Thor had taken him again with Loki teetering above him, impaled, spunk dried on his belly and his balls drawn up tight and his head thrown back, wailing, clawing at Thor’s chest with one hand as he pumped his cock and Thor had followed him over, groaning, the wet twitch of his dick deep inside of Loki’s body enough to make him cry out again.

Now, years later, they were fucking in their own bed, in a place of their own making, and the troubles of the city, of the business, seemed so small here, so insignificant, with first Thor’s face and then his cock buried between Loki’s thighs.

“You’re brothers,” their father had told them when they were small, when he was first teaching them the tools of the trade. “Never mind who your mothers were--I’m your father. It’s my blood that binds you, which means you must be loyal to each other, you understand? The rest of the world can go fuck itself but you two, you must always be allied.” He’d bent down and put his heavy hands on their shoulders, his knees kissing the hard cabin floor. “Do you know what the word ‘allied’ means, Thor?”

“No, Father.”

“Hmm. Do you, Loki?”

“No.”

Their father’s fingers had tightened. “It means,” he said fiercely, “that you must always stay together, no matter what happens. You must look out for each other, yes? There will be times, I’m sure, when you don’t like each other, but it doesn’t matter. You must always have each other’s backs because no one else in this damnable world ever will.”

They hadn’t known then, how could they, that he was including himself. He’d betrayed them more times than Loki could count, spent years in their youth pitting them against the other, creating a needless competition, an awful kind of rivalry, that had on more than one occasion nearly gotten them caught--or worse, torn them apart.

But there was something unbreakable between them; that’s what their father had taught them. A bond so firm and so strong that even he couldn’t break it. And his death--long, slow, and indescribably painful--had only solidified it, helped reshape it into this thing that kept them tangled always, two vines that could never be disentwined.

“Brother,” Loki panted, his nails biting at Thor’s back. He felt desperate, wild with it, the smell of dust in his nose, the sun cutting into his eyes. “Harder. Fuck me harder. I’m close. I’m so fucking close. I need--”

Thor growled, a deep, hungry sound, and sat up a little. He grabbed at the back of Loki’s knees, spread him wider and shoved in deeper, grinned like a madman. “Like this?” he said. “Is that better, baby? Is that what you want? Oh, gods, Loki, look at you. I love you like this.”

Then there was no more need for speech; there was only noise, pleasure and need and the pound of the four-poster combined.

“I love you,” Loki said when it was quiet again, when Thor’s head was pressed to the sound of his heart.

“Really? I thought you were ready to disown me after yesterday.”

“I still might.”

Thor chuckled. He toyed with the sticky mess on Loki’s stomach. “But not right now, is that it?”

“Not right now.” Loki threaded a hand through his brother’s hair and pulled the great golden head up to his own. “I accept your apology.”

“You do, huh?”

“I do.”

Thor grinned against his mouth, his touch growing bolder, his smirk wider. “Oh, really? How would you feel about accepting another one?”

Around them, the world was waking up, the woods, the far-away cities. The room in which they lay, once dingy and crowded with ghosts, was full of clean air and the sweet sharpness of sunlight. That was their doing, their own legacy, Loki thought hazily as his brother stroked him back to hardness and murmured sweetness in his ear. Now, this was their place.

“Don’t worry,” Thor whispered as he pulled Loki beneath him. “We won’t have to stay here too long.”

Loki arched his back and whimpered as Thor entered him in one swift, needy stroke. “I don’t mind,” he managed, winding his arms around his brother’s neck. “I love it here. This is home.”


End file.
